I think you'll find a significant number of people who decide not to enter competitions because their music just won't fit in that world.

I wrote a lot of software to do various kinds of special things, and I loved the idea of composing pieces in an electronic studio.

I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.

I came to what I think of as the critical problem: the aging process of a piece of music. I noticed in the '70s that pieces I wrote would sound great the first time I listened to them and then on repeated hearings they sounded older and older until what seemed exciting and vibrant on first listening became stale.

Sometimes I imagine that there's a binary division going on in contemporary practice that has to do with chromatic versus diatonic. I notice that I tend to listen in a diatonic sense, that I register a pitch as a member of a diatonic scale, even in a non-tonal context.

The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.